Currently, many businesses develop web service systems. To promote interoperability, web service standards, such as Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI) web service standard, have been defined. Web services broadly refer to any service capable of being described by a binding template. Typically, web services are used for machine-to-machine communication, and they share much of the technology that underlies the World Wide Web, such as Transfer Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), and Extended Markup Language (XML).
A web service system typically includes one or more nodes. As used herein, a node broadly refers to a collection of web services, each of which implements the APIs in a predefined API set, such as a UDDI API set, and that are managed according to a common set of policies. One or more nodes may be combined to form a registry. The nodes in a registry collectively manage a particular set of data. This data may include one or more records. A registry federation is a collection of registries logically arranged in a predetermined topology. Multiple registries within the registry federation may cooperate with each other based on the rule that a registry can promote into an affiliate or a root registry. Conventionally, one registry can promote a record into another registry within the registry federation by copying the record to the other registry. However, the problem with this approach is that the records copied have to be kept in synchronization in all registries involved. It is generally time-consuming to copy records between the registries. Furthermore, some registries may not receive the updated records in time.